But Duncan still felt a faint hope that this time he had something good enough. Something to tempt the Kaiser himself to attend the opening show. It was not impossible. The Kaiser loved the Wild West. He had read Karl May and Zane Grey and James Fenimore Cooper. He had attended Wild West shows. Annie Oakley had once shot a lit cigarette from his lips.

The act had to be better than Cossacks or re-enacting Little Big Horn. It had to be better than Annie Oakley. Duncan hadn’t put a female sharpshooter on the program in years, for he had learned that the pleasures of such talented women were obliterated by their ability to draw firearms on him.

The act likely should involve shooting. Which he wasn’t that good at. Then he considered that his posters could mention only the shooting, not that any particular shot would hit its target. Wasn’t it impressive enough to see him try to hit six glass balls at once? Wasn’t his failure at least poignant?

But even the scruples of Percy Bysshe Duncan smarted from too hard a spur in the flank. Standing at the printer broker’s office in Tenafly, text design form before him, fingers drumming on the zinc counter, pen to his chapped lips, he had it: a phrase describing an act to amaze anyone who came to his show, something he could execute himself, three terrible words, a legend he could live up to: “Shooting While Drunk.”

5

Tempelhofer Field, upon which the Ruhleben racetrack was built, was a monumental arena of parched grass reserved for military spectacles and any performances the royal family might attend (all of which in the past twelvemonth had been, ominously, military spectacles).

The entryway’s iron gates creaked reluctantly when Duncan’s team came to erect their modest, temporary village: a lighting plant, a canvas tent for costume changes, a chow wagon, a shop for the man who was both blacksmith and veterinarian (and, recently, a reluctant Cossack). The Onondaga women who did the Longhouse dances were raking over the ground with poles and brooms, to dislodge stones or fill in rabbit holes that might trip them up. A score of horses were given their freedom in a sandy paddock. Rather than kick up their heels and expel gas, they huddled together silently. They didn’t even flutter their lips, as if nervous about disclosing their location.

The setting reminded Duncan of the Roman Colosseum, which he almost mentioned aloud, since this comparison would of course make his troupe gladiators. It was a thought that was jolly but not, if followed to its logical conclusion, that jolly.